The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

the throes of love, he can be counted on to speak of the woman with tender disparagement—with amazement, even. He likes to saythat it’s crazy, he does not understand it, he can plainly see that this person isn’t his kind of person at all. And yet, and yet, and yet. And yet it’s beyond him, irresistible. He told Stella that Catherine believed in horoscopes, was a vegetarian, and painted weird pictures in which tiny figures were enclosed in plastic bubbles.
    “The roast,” says Stella, suddenly alarmed. “Will she eat meat?”
    “What?”
    “Will Catherine eat meat?”
    “She may not eat anything. She may be too spaced out.”
    “I’m making an apple-and-onion casserole. It’ll be quite substantial. Maybe she’ll eat that.”
    Last summer, he said, “She’s a hippie survivor, really. She doesn’t even know those times are gone. I don’t think she’s ever read a newspaper. She hasn’t the remotest idea of what’s going on in the world. Unless she’s heard it from a fortune-teller. That’s her idea of reality. I don’t think she can read a map. She’s all instinct. Do you know what she did? She went to Ireland to see the Book of Kells. She’d heard the Book of Kells was in Ireland. So she just got off the plane at Shannon Airport, and asked somebody the way to the Book of Kells. And you know what, she found it!”
    Stella asked how this fey creature earned the money for trips to Ireland.
    “Oh, she has a job,” David said. “Sort of a job. She teaches art, part time. God knows what she teaches them. To paint by their horoscopes, I think.”
    Now he says, “There’s somebody else. I haven’t told Catherine. Do you think she senses it? I think she does. I think she senses it.”
    He is leaning against the counter, watching Stella peel apples. He reaches quickly into his inside pocket, and before Stella can turn her head away he is holding a Polaroid snapshot in front of her eyes.
    “That’s my new girl,” he says.
    “It looks like lichen,” says Stella, her paring knife halting. “Except it’s rather dark. It looks to me like moss on a rock.”
    “Don’t be dumb, Stella. Don’t be cute. You can see her. See her legs?”
    Stella puts the paring knife down and squints obediently. Thereis a flattened-out breast far away on the horizon. And the legs spreading into the foreground. The legs are spread wide—smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it’s really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.
    “Well, I can see now,” she says, in a sensible voice.
    “Her name is Dina. Dina without an ‘h.’ She’s twenty-two years old.”
    Stella won’t ask him to put the picture away, or even to stop holding it in front of her face.
    “She’s a bad girl,” says David. “Oh, she’s a bad girl! She went to school to the nuns. There are no bad girls like those convent-school girls, once they decide to go wild! She was a student at the art college where Catherine teaches. She quit. Now she’s a cocktail waitress.”
    “That doesn’t sound so terribly depraved to me. Deirdre was a cocktail waitress for a while when she was at college.”
    “Dina’s not like Deirdre.”
    At last, the hand holding the picture drops, and Stella picks up her knife and resumes peeling the apples. But David doesn’t put the picture away. He starts to, then changes his mind.
    “The little witch,” he says. “She torments my soul.”
    His voice when he talks about this girl seems to Stella peculiarly artificial. But who is she to say, with David, what is artificial and what is not? This special voice of his is rather high-pitched, monotonous, insistent, with a deliberate, cruel sweetness. Whom does he want to be cruel to—Stella, Catherine, the girl, himself? Stella gives a sigh that is noisier and more exasperated than she meant it to be and puts down an apple